Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Housemarque
Platform: Playstation 5
Price: $69.99
The last time a AAA game won my GOTY award was 2020 with Doom Eternal. Since then it's been indie win after indie win after indie win. AAAs have come close to taking home the gold in the meantime (like God of War: Ragnarok, which won spot #2 in 2022, or Astro Bot, which came in the top 5 for 2024), but the big publishers just haven't seemed to hit it out of the park in the past few years.
Well...Saros poses an interesting question.
Will 2026 be the year where that changes?
And perhaps more interestingly...
Will 2026 be the first year in this blog's entire history where a roguelike wins GOTY? Given that GTA VI isn't likely to blow me away half as much as it will the rest of the world, I'd say it's a definite possibility.
I've shown my hand pretty early here, I'm afraid. We're only about halfway through the year, but Saros is the frontrunner at the moment. Despite being a roguelike of all things. Roguelikes suck. The entire concept sucks. They're usually a surefire way to tell that a developer doesn't actually have a creative bone in their body. But Saros is different.
Let's get right into it.
You are Arjun Devraj: a Soltari enforcer sent to Carcosa with a team of elites with one main objective: to locate the now-missing previous expeditions to the planet. Among the lost is Arjun's lover, Nitya, whom he is convinced is still alive.
But finding Nitya or the other colonists doesn't end up as easy as combing the planet's surface. Carcosa seems to be largely sentient. It frequently "changes its mind" about how it wants to be structured, and the eclipse that often overshadows it seeks to bend all life under it to its will.
So, there we have our story...such as it is. It's fairly simple to follow if you're really, really paying attention...but despite how that statement sounded, I myself wasn't paying close enough attention to get everything on a first go around.
The fact of the matter is that Saros chooses style over clarity, possibly to its detriment. I'm the kind of person that can forgive this choice if the style is sufficiently stylish (and it is in this game), but you'll know better than I do how far that'll take your enjoyment.
It's a shame, because the actual meat and bones of the backstory here is pretty good...but I wouldn't say it's 100% good enough to warrant the legwork it takes to understand it in the first place.
One last note about the story. While I can forgive choosing style over clarity, I do have to admit that the trope of "vague existential responses" gets more than a little old by the end. If you don't know what I mean, consider the following exchange:
Arjun: what will I find there?
Voice: everything
That's a problem that gets worse as the plot progresses...but again, your mileage may vary if you're a sucker for vibes like I am.
This is a third-person bullet hell shooter with a roguelike structure. So essentially, you'll spend your time dashing around combat arenas avoiding thousands upon thousands of projectiles, all in procedurally-generated maps littered with randomly-selected loot.
Let's talk about the combat loop itself before we get to the roguelike stuff, shall we?
I want you to picture yourself playing a third-person version of Doom Eternal: The Ancient Gods.
I worry you misread that as just Doom Eternal.
I did not say the base game.
I specified the The Ancient Gods DLCs. Not every combat encounter is quite that fast, but the really intense ones happen at speed levels that are genuinely dizzying.
The bits and bobs you'll be dodging in this whiplash-inducing bullet ballet come in three varieties: blue, yellow, and red.
Blue projectiles are the basic ones, and they're avoided simply by...well...avoiding getting hit by them...which in like 90% of cases means by dodging through them or shielding.
Yellow projectiles are avoided the same way blue ones are, but they lower your total maximum health if they hit you.
Finally, red projectiles can't be dodged through and must instead be parried.
Projectiles also come in different shapes that denote different movement patterns, but that's all a bit too in-depth for our purposes today.
As for how you'll dispatch the enemies sending these threats your way, you're equipped with the following: a main weapon, a power weapon, a shield, a parry, and a melee attack.
The main weapon is your primary damage-dealer, and it comes in the form of one of several gun types you already know and love (assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, etc). There are different varieties of each. For example, some assault rifles have homing bullets and some pistols have explosive effects. Every weapon also comes with a secondary firing mode activated by holding L2 down halfway (which feels pretty cool, even though I seldom remembered to actually do it).
Your power weapon is really more of a magic spell than anything. It comes in forms like a gigantic homing missile or rapid-fire chip damage beams, and these weapons play a major role in crowd control when that aforementioned speed gets to be too much. They're powered by a bar that gets filled mainly by absorbing blue and yellow projectiles with your shield.
Speaking of which, that shield is pretty self-explanatory. It protects you from damage, though obviously it has the secondary benefit of allowing you to fill up your power weapons. However, absorbing yellow projectiles will still lower your total maximum health, and absorbing a red projectile will both hurt you and completely drain all your power weapon juice.
The parry is the most straightforward of the bunch. You hit red projectiles to knock both them and a large swath of surrounding bullets back to enemies. This can be further augmented to generate weapon power and increase stagger on your foes.
Finally, there's the melee attack, which actually plays a far more prominent role in the moment-to-moment combat loop than you might expect. See, in many combat encounters, a handful of enemies will coat themselves in red shields that prevent any weapon damage of any kind. So with these enemies, you need to close the distance (in a bullet hell, remember) and land a solid punch. This almost always results in an instant kill, so the melee does more than just break the shields. It serves as a way to force you into the heart of the chaos from time to time.
You also eventually unlock a grappling hook. This doesn't help you kill anything, but you can use it on a grappling point from literally anywhere in any of these gigantic arenas as long as you can see said points. So, picture an already hectic encounter where you're being swarmed by enemies, and then picture having the ability to instantly put a whole arena's worth of distance between you and the horde by looking at a pin-sized structure in the distance and pressing the triangle button. It's flipping sweet.
So, let's put this all together. In a single combat encounter, you'll spend your time flipping between:
-shooting at enemies
-dodging projectiles
-launching hard-hitting heavy blasts into crowds
-dodging into projectiles with your shield up to power your power weapon
-knocking red projectiles back at enemies at the very last second
-dashing and jumping through an obstacle course of bullets to punch through a shield
-flinging yourself all the way across the arena with your grappling hook
-returning into the fray after a kill to pick up health and experience drops before that experience disappears
And you'll flip through these things sometimes within less than a second.
I repeat: dizzyingly fast. And I've only scratched the surface.
Saros takes place in several biomes, with each serving as a "level." Each time you enter a biome, the specific map and layout is randomized. There are a handful of pieces of each biome that are the same every run, though, so it's not all random.
While this aspect of Saros is recognizably randomized and therefore recognizably a roguelike element, I can't ever say it felt random. It's not hard to tell where one randomly generated piece of a map ends and another begins, but from an artistic standpoint, it all flows so smoothly and feels so organic that it, again, doesn't feel randomly put together.
No two biomes are exactly alike in flow, either. For example, a key facet of each biome is that there are certain points where you can "call" the eclipse. Doing this populates the area with more difficult enemies that hit harder, and it enables these enemies to use yellow projectiles. It also increases the quality of your rewards and unlocks access to some areas that can't be reached otherwise. It also has an additional effect on your loot, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Your ability to call the eclipse differs radically based on the biome. In the first level, you have to call it at the halfway point in order to continue. In another level, you might have no choice but to call the eclipse right from the get-go. In another one, it might not be required until the very end, but you have the choice of starting from either the beginning or middle to maximize your rewards at your leisure. The rules of engagement and the degree of strictness with which they must be followed depends on the biome, so it's not like you're going into the same ultimate structure every time you move onto something new.
This is all enhanced by the fact that the makeup of a biome changes after you reach a different one for the first time. You literally get a handful of brand new map section types...and the cherry on top? The biome doesn't get any harder. It stays at the original difficulty level but just gets revamped with extra stuff to make going back to grind more interesting. Hard for things to feel too random when the devs put that much work into the level design.
And even when things do feel randomly put together, I found them so exciting that I didn't care. For an example, look no further than the loot that you find in chests. Like the projectiles, chests come in blue, yellow, and red varieties.
The blue chests will contain an "artifact", a key, or a main weapon.
As you gain more and more experience in a biome, your "proficiency" increases, which increases the levels of the weapons you pick up. This means better damage and (usually) better other stats like recoil or auto-aim windows.
Sometimes you'll get a weapon type you don't want...but as you progress far enough to get weapon types you don't want, you'll also get items that let you re-roll a reward. So even when chance doesn't quite favor you, the game gives you ways of potentially changing your luck that you can almost always get some use out of.
Then there's the "artifacts," which are essentially stat boosts that come with an additional benefit. One artifact might slightly increase your maximum health and grant you a second or two of immunity after you kill an enemy. Another might forego a secondary effect to offer a more major increase among all three of your stats (health, "power," and experience gain).
But during the eclipse, things get flipped on their heads. The stat increases are bigger, but you instead get saddled with a negative secondary effect should you pick it up (these eclipse artifacts are picked up with a button hold instead of a press, so you don't take on any negatives by accident). Normally I'm not a fan of these kinds of systems...but the negative effects are so well thought-out that there's actually a satisfying level of strategy involved.
This is because these negatives aren't about stats. They're about gameplay itself. So you can make informed decisions based on how your playstyle tends to go.
For instance, some eclipse artifacts come with an effect that makes you take fall damage. But if you dash before you land, it doesn't count as a fall. So all this negative effect ultimately chalks up to is a need to stay vigilant and remember that you have this effect in the first place.
Another potential side effect is an increase to your dash cooldown. But if you're really good with your shield and parries, it's possible that you aren't even using your dash that much! I personally can't imagine that actually being the case given the speed of combat, but it's a possibility.
For one last example, you might get an increase in weapon recoil...but if you're using auto-aim weapons like I did every chance I got, then what recoil?
These negatives have tangible impacts on gameplay, but you're going to find effects that are basically meaningless because of how you play. And it doesn't take much thought to come to these conclusions. More games need tradeoff systems like this instead of "-2% damage when you use a frost weapon".
As for the keys (the last thing you can get from blue chests), they're used to open some optional doors and (segue time) the yellow chests. These chests contain exclusively power weapons, the level of which also increases with "proficiency".
Finally, the red chests offer you a choice of the full gamut of rewards I've already discussed and more. When you open these chests, you'll be presented with two rewards, and you're to choose one of them. These rewards can be weapons, artifacts, power weapons, simple stat increases, rare finite upgrade materials, and healing.
Your only methods of healing are random health drops from enemies, the occasional (but rare) static drops, and these red chest drops. So, red chests can be crucial to track down.
There's one last big thing that prevents this from feeling like a roguelike, and that's the armor upgrade system. Every time you return to the hub (whether from death or teleporting back at the end of a biome), your experience from the run is put into a pool you can tap into. If you die during a run you only retain half of what you earned, but it's still usually a decent amount.
This experience can then be cashed in at a skill tree that offers you permanent stat upgrades, as well as some important permanent extra effects. One such effect is a "second chance" where you revive with a little bit of health after you get killed.
In this way, forward momentum is a guarantee, not a random reward. Every time you die, you come back stronger in some objective way.
Enemies hit hard and healing drops don't do nearly as much as you'd expect from looking at their size. Plus there are thousands upon thousands of bullets on screen at any given moment, so the potential to take damage is unrelenting. You're going to die, and you're going to die often...but as you might have already realized, the fact that you get permanent upgrades with each death makes it so that you'll almost always get further next time.
At the same time, I do have to say there's one aspect to Saros' difficulty that might be disheartening to you...and even if it doesn't dishearten you (such as in my case), you'll still probably go "ohhhhh nooooo" and cover your mouth like I did when I had this realization.
When you die in most biomes, you have to do the full biome and its associated mission all over again. The first biome and one late-game one are exceptions to this rule, but for most of the runtime, you'll be re-doing an entire level's worth of progress every time you die.
"How bad could that be?" I hear you potentially ask. Re-doing a level upon death isn't exactly a new or frowned upon thing in game design. One could convincingly argue that death in Dark Souls does that with things like the Four Kings runback or the first Undead Burg bonfire (until you kick down the ladder shortcut).
The difference is that a given biome from start to finish lasts somewhere between 20-30 minutes. When you reach the boss at the end after several difficult arenas, you're not likely to survive very long on a first or second attempt. If you're lucky, you'll pick up on the boss' attack patterns quickly...but again, it isn't likely.
This means that you'll be re-doing the same 20-30 minutes repeatedly, and that can easily be a gruelingly difficult stretch of time (to say nothing of the fact that you might get creamed within 10 seconds of the boss encounter at the end of an attempt). As with every other facet of difficulty, this thankfully becomes less and less of a hassle every time you try thanks to (say it with me) the constant upgrading. 20-30 minutes of stuff is an awful lot to redo, though, and I can acknowledge that fact despite not personally having a problem with it.
If all this is sounding like a bit too much for you, fear not. Housemarque thought ahead on this.
After proving you're good enough at the game to get through two biomes, you unlock optional modifiers you can set to make things easier or more challenging.
The positive modifiers can allow you to, for instance, remove the negative secondary effects from eclipse artifacts. Or they can do something as simple as reducing incoming damage or increasing outgoing damage.
The negative modifiers, on the other hand, can disable your "second chance" or cause every type of projectile to lower your maximum health.
Now, hold your horses, "hardcores" and "casuals" alike! Housemarque giveth and taketh away here. Sure, you can set yourself up with a bunch of positive modifiers...but the planet must always remain in "balance."
The modifier system comes with a needle scale that sits in a neutral position by default. Adding positive modifiers moves that needle a bit to the left, while negative modifiers move it to the right. Each modifier comes with a number value that indicates how much it moves the needle when activated. There's a window of about 3 ticks per side on that scale that are "safe", but once you move the needle too far to the positive side, the world is no longer in balance, and you therefore must add a negative modifier to move the needle back into range.
In this way, Housemarque gives you the ability to rise to the challenge in a customizable way. The overall difficulty ultimately remains the same, but the building blocks can be skewed in your favor, in other words.
Let's say you've gone through a biome a few times and you've gathered every piece of armor upgrade material located there. Well...in that case, surely activating the modifier that prevents the material from spawning wouldn't have any adverse effects, would it?
Or maybe you're really close to beating the boss, but you're just trying to get through the level at this point and you're thinking you'll worry about upgrades after the fact. Same theoretical: activating this modifier isn't going to hurt anything. So, switch it on. Doing so will give you a full +6 ticks to the right, which will allow you to add as many as 5 positive modifiers while still remaining in balance.
Or for a slightly less cheesy example, maybe you subscribe to the idea that less time on the battlefield means you're less likely to take damage. In that case, you could turn up the damage you deal and balance it out with an increase to the damage you take.
It's a system that lets you have your cake and eat it. You get to give yourself a slightly easier time if you want it without actually making the game easier to play. The tradeoff means you get to keep your pride intact, at least in my case. This is also helped by the fact that if you're aiming for 100% completion, you have to do 30ish runs with modifiers active. The devs want you to screw with the settings, so why not?
Let me give a personal example of these ideas in practice. As the eclipses became more and more frequent in the latter half of Saros, I elected to remove the eclipse artifact secondary effects in exchange for maximum health being drained with every hit. All because I judged that stat increases without a catch would likely balance out the extra punishment for mistakes.
I'm rambling at this point, but like everything else in Saros, this system is so smart, and I'd love to see this kind of "balance" approach to difficulty put into practice more often.
One last thing to note about the technical side is the game's brilliant use of the PS5 controller's built-in haptics. Every shot has a punch to it, and that goes double for shots fired in the half-held secondary fire modes. Every dash, every projectile absorbed by the shield, every parry, every thing is given some degree of feedback you can feel in your hands.
Rather than just re-hash talking points I've covered thus far to wrap this thing up, I'd like to emphasize something I haven't yet mentioned.
Saros is the only game this year that I couldn't wait to get back to once I turned it off for the night. I'd wake up the next morning and look forward to 8pm, which is typically the earliest I allow myself to start playing something on a given day.
Speaking of specific times and the role they play in my routine, this is also the only game in 2026 that I've broken my nightly habits for. I typically stop my gaming at 11pm and start winding down for the night with something on YouTube. But while I was playing Saros, I'd regularly feel the itch an hour or so after I put it down, think "just one more run," and break my own rules to get back to it.
I'm neurodivergent. Do you know how good something has to be to make me break my self-imposed rules? The last game to do that was Hollow Knight: Silksong...and that ultimately ended up winning GOTY 2025.
So...there you go! 2026 is going to be an interesting year, that's for sure.
For now, though, I recommend Saros if you can play it...meaning, if have the necessary singular piece of hardware and the right amount of money lying around. Thank you Sony, as always, for the ridiculous dedication to exclusivity and higher prices. I'm sure that won't affect your bottom line in any way!
Let us review:
Weak storytelling - 0.5
The final score for Saros is...
9.5/10 - Near Masterpiece
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